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Anguished boxing boss Frank Maloney has told how he will never forget the look on his devoted wife Tracey’s face the moment he told her his darkest secret.

Their marriage was already in turmoil because of the hell he was going through as he battled his shame at wanting to be a woman.

Crippled by depression, Frank had suffered a major heart attack in 2009 as he tried to cope with the stress of hiding his secret desire.

His unhappiness was driving a wedge between the couple . His wife thought she was to blame for everything and was worried about his deteriorating health.

Then one morning in 2012, he could not bear it any longer.

Kellie told the Sunday Mirror: “I couldn’t watch her going through what she was going through. She was trying to keep us together while all the time we were speaking less.

“She was blaming herself for the breakdown of our marriage.

“One morning it all came out of me. I just said to her ‘The problem with this marriage is not you. The problem with this marriage is me’.

“We were standing in the kitchen and I said ‘I have to tell you that I have lived with this all my life. I’ve lived a lie and I really am a female in my head.’

Frank Maloney, now known as Kellie

“As the words started to come out I wanted to catch them and pull them back in. I looked at her face and I knew my marriage was over. She was the first person I had told outside counsellors. I could see what it was doing to her and I had to release her.

“I went upstairs and I broke down. She came up and I told her I was going to our house abroad. I packed my stuff and left. I stayed abroad for quite a while.

“It felt like the first time I had actually been honest. It felt a bit like a weight had come off but I still knew I had to protect my children.

“She swore she would never tell anyone and to this day she hasn’t. We are very good friends now. She is very supportive and very loyal to me. She was very upset and sad but we knew there was no going back.

“I was not happy when the ­ relationship ended. It had been a security net around me. I was very sad when it ended. But it was the first step of me starting a life as a woman.”

Kellie then knew she had to take another huge step – telling her elderly mother Maureen and three daughters. She feared they would reject him and she would lose everyone she loved.

She says: “I had put myself in a ­position where I had again lied to a woman who loved me and was very protective of me. It was the hardest thing in the world to come out to my family.

“But the decision was made for me because my three daughters and my mum thought I was dying.

“Eventually I had to come out. I had to tell them all about it. My desires affected my relationships. It became a burden I was carrying and I became drawn inwards.”

“One daughter said to me ‘You know what Dad? I can forgive you what you are doing, but you know what I can’t forgive? I can’t forgive you for becoming famous because that has thrown light on to us.’

“She said that if I had not been famous that nobody would bother me. I would have just slipped through the net.”

Kellie, who had been raised by Irish parents in Peckham, South East London, says her mother’s love and compassion for her plight has given her strength as she looks to live the rest of her life as Kellie. Following a strict Catholic upbringing Kellie says at one time the young Frank wanted to train to be a priest – but did not enjoy time at the seminary.

Frank’s father was proud of him as a boy and what he achieved as a man, but he was the one person who would never understand Kellie’s secret urges.

She says: “One big issue against ever revealing this side of myself was my father. While he was still alive he put me on a pedestal because what I had achieved in boxing. I was too frightened to tell him. At the same time I had distanced myself from my mum and I don’t know why. In my world the last thing you wanted to be seen as was a mummy’s boy. I finally told her about wanting to be a woman because she was worried about my health.

‘I had to tell her why I was like I was.”

She says the supportive reaction she got from her mum was astounding – and she even managed to crack a joke about it. Her exact words were ‘Why didn’t you come to me when you were younger? Anyway, all we had to do was change the ‘I’ to an ‘E’ in your name Francis’,” says Frank.

“She told me it was time to start looking after myself and living the life I wanted to live. But she said it would have been hard for my father to accept.”

Kellie had known from childhood that she was “different” to other boys and had to suppress her desire to dress as a girl. She fought a constant battle within herself. She says: “Unfortunately, from the day I was born my hormones and my body didn’t connect to my brain. I knew I was different from the moment I could compare myself to others. I never felt comfortable doing boys things, playing boys games. But I buried myself in them to make sure that I wasn’t seen as different.”

The fight promoter and showman who would go on to rub shoulders with ring giants like Frank Bruno, Nigel Benn and Don King, pledged to never allow any transgender exploits to be exposed.

Kellie says: “I have met a couple of ‘girls’ who transitioned years ago. In those days they were constantly being threatened and they were beaten. I wasn’t going to put myself in that position.

“Some people secretly dress up all the time but I only did it very rarely when I was younger. I did it now and again and always in private. I always wanted to be accepted in society and didn’t want to be seen as a freak.

“I never bought a lot of clothes because I never wanted a wardrobe. I thought that if I did it once it would kill the urge. I was told by one helpline I contacted I should do it just every so often and that it would help me ‘get over it’. I’d throw the female clothes away after trying them on. I feared anyone finding them.”

Kellie reveals it was a relief to her when top sports stars began signing lucrative deals to be the faces of a new metrosexual generation in the 1990s.

Smiling, she says: “I was pleased when David Beckham and other high profile figures started waxing and having their eyebrows done because I could do it openly.” It was a small relief during a period of her life when her image as a man at the head of a macho sport was stronger than ever. As Frank, he had started life as a boxer becoming a professional trainer in the late 1970s working with another boxing legend, Frank Warren.

He later moved into management but his career began to soar after signing Lennox Lewis in 1989, a year after he won Olympic heavyweight gold in the Seoul games. Alongside the 6ft 5ins fighter, 5ft 4ins Frank was part of an unstoppable double act.

But at the same time, the mental torture was destroying him. Kellie reveals: “An image was building of me being a lad about town. I was not happy in myself but I liked the image I was projecting. Mentally I was tearing myself apart.

“I knew it was either continue and succeed, throw myself off a bridge or give into my urges and be ridiculed.

Now Kellie has worked with therapists to overcome her fears about going public with her new identity. She says: “Nobody has seen me for such a long time. I have been off the radar. I have not even spoken to friends. Because of my size I have been able to go out as a woman and blend in. I’ve never had any problems unlike other poor girls. I want to be sociable.

“I don’t want to live a life behind doors. The trouble is even calm people, when they have had a drink, can get nasty if they are hiding fears of their own.”

Her fears hark back to early days in tough South East London where a young Frank grew up as a Millwall fan. She still follows them today. Kellie says: “In my teens I read in the papers about how other transsexuals were treated.

“They had been were seen as freaks and outcasts in society and I certainly didn’t want that. I saw the treatments some transsexuals were given, like electric shocks to their head, and I thought ‘nobody is doing that to me’. I knew I had to beat this my way. Lots of these people ended up in the ‘nuthouse’.”

Sat in a neat dress and stilettos, Kellie says of her new life: “This is not easy. You do not choose it. If you got 100 ­transsexual girls together I bet that most would take a pill to stop it if there was one. I know I would.

“Nobody knows what we go through. I’ve had 170 hours of electrolysis. I’ve had 76,000 hairs removed from my face and I’m only about three quarters of the way there. I have to go voice coaching every week. I did not just wake up one morning and say ‘I’m going to put a dress on and become a woman.’

“Every time we leave the house we are in fear of being ‘read’ by someone who notices we are transgender. You never know how people will take it.”